Wednesday, November 8, 2017

If you can imagine one of those animated flip books that we had as kids, then you will imagine how this painting came to life.

First I covered the entire canvas with warm colours, making such no white was showing.

Next, I mixed up some paint for my sky, and worked on the negative shapes of the background, which in turn defines your positive leaf shapes. This was a bit of a mind game. It was also rather exhausting and took a long time. Slowly the painting started to come to life.

Once the leaves took shape, I danced back and forth between the background and the foreground.

At some point I decided that I wanted to add a bird into the painting, so I made a nice space for him to perch on a stem.

Adding the blue bird gave the painting more character.
Then many many more dabs and brush marks and dah, dah....